Ben Carson, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, proposed on Monday new changes to an Obama-era rule aimed at combating segregation in housing policy.

Carson wants the rule to focus more on reducing the regulatory burdens of local jurisdictions and on giving them more control, while encouraging actions that bolster housing choice and increase housing supply.

That much is evident from the past week, which has seen the lira tumble in value at a breakneck pace. It has dropped more than 40 percent against the U.S. dollar on the year, with much of that plunge unfolding since the start of August. Before a modest rally early Monday, a single dollar bought about 7.2 lira — a grim new record for Turkey.

This week, the Puy du Fou theme park in western France put some new employees in the field: six trained rooks, members of the crow family, picking up small pieces of paper and cigarette butts in exchange for food.

Boubou, Bamboo, Bill, Black, Bricole and Baco officially started their new gigs on Monday.

For the record, the park would like to note, the corvid colleagues are not replacing any human cleaning staff.

The Taliban's surprise attack Friday on the city of Ghazni has now killed around 100 members of Afghanistan's police and security forces and between 20 and 30 civilians, Afghan officials said Monday.

A U.S. military spokesman told NPR's Diaa Hadid that some 140 Taliban insurgents have also died – meaning the fighting has already cost nearly 300 lives since the Taliban launched its assault. Afghan officials differed in their account, saying nearly 200 Taliban fighters have been killed.

I've been a fan of Kevin Wilson's writing since 2011, when I read his debut novel The Family Fang. That novel delved into the life of a husband and wife pair of performance artists who worked their young children into their pieces. Without being pat about it, Wilson drove home the realization that every family constitutes its own rag-tag troupe of performance artists and that children are mostly at the mercy of their parents' "acts."

For three days in a row, throngs of protesters took to the streets in Romania's capital city, Bucharest, to protest what they see as a corrupt government and to call for new elections.

Tens of thousands of people rallied Friday on the first day of demonstrations, which were largely organized by Romanian expatriates who came home to demonstrate en masse; some estimates put the crowd at 100,000.